ABSTRACT
Introduction Early childhood settings present children with many opportunities to engage in interactions with each other and with the teachers in their classrooms and playgrounds. Young children are routinely propelled into play situations where they are sometimes out of sight and out of earshot of the teachers. What goes on in those play situations is the very serious work of constructing social order (Denzin, 1982; Goodwin, 1985 and 1990). On close inspection, this work turns out to be intricate and itself oriented to a recognition that there is more than one social order to manage. One of the themes of this volume is that children’s achievements are bounded by structural features (especially in this case, a potentially overhearing teacher). This chapter also shows how children make use of such structural features (the possibility and the fact of teacher intervention) as material for their work of social organization.
